When GQ Style met Anna Paquin

From the GQ archive:Sexy, smart
and with a higher than normal tolerance for weirdness, Anna Paquin
is every vampire's dream date. True Blood's leading lady talks to Jonathan
Heaf about blondes, blood-sucking and very short shorts.

Anna Paquin certainly knows how to get a man's attention. 'I've
never really been one of those girls who's scared of showing a bit
of flesh,' she says. "If you look back at some of the movies I've
done - perhaps not the highlights - I played the scantily clad girl
before I even had legitimate bits that were worth showing off."

Despite her candid protestations, licentiousness was never a
quality you'd necessarily associate with the 27-year-old,
Canada-born, New Zealand-bred Oscar-winning actress. Well, not, of
course, until Paquin was cast as the fang-banging, mind-reading,
superbly named Sookie Stackhouse in Alan Ball's True Blood, a TV series so hot - both
in terms of Hollywood heat and its suitability for minors - that
audiences both here and in America are falling over their remotes
to suck it up. Thanks to Anna Paquin and the show's hunky vampires,
sexy, badass blood is suddenly very big business.

The undead haven't always been quite so in demand, nor quite so
handsome. The transformation of the vampire from folkloric creeper
to skin-pricking pinup all started at the literary world's most
legendary house party, held at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, 17
June 1816. A decadent, horny, riotous gang of cultural upstarts and
their foppish rent boys were playing a game of show 'n' tell with
their fav-ourite ghost stories. The host? Lord Byron, devilishly
handsome, pansexual and invariably wasted. He was in fine fettle
and good company: a teenage Mary Shelley was there, as was a young
physician named John Polidori. As legend has it, the showy,
competitive Byron came up with that evening's parlour game,
instructing all those attending to pen their very own ghost story.
Famously, only two of them completed the assignment with any
success: Mary Shelley - whose nameless monster, sewn and bolted
together by one Dr Victor Frankenstein, went on to become one of
popular culture's most enduring metaphors - and Polidori, who went
to his desk at the Diodati and laid down the first lines of a book
that was eventually to become The Vampyre, published in 1819.

Lurid, suave, socially ambitious, sartorially savvy and
crackling with the threat of sexual deviancy, Polidori's vampires
appeared in a newly glamorous, erotic light. His literary vision
has endured, going on to colour every depiction of the bloodsuckers
since - from Bram Stoker's Dracula and Béla Lugosi on Broadway in
1927 to Anne Rice's Lestat, and Edward Cullen in Stephanie Meyer's
endless Twilight saga, played, of course, to
knicker-wetting effect by the one-man youthquake that is Robert Pattinson.

Gallery edited by Michael Parsons

Jonathan Heaf

Jonathan Heaf is Features Director of GQ. Follow him on Twitter @jonathanheaf.